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“The working class is the victim of a conspiracy that aims to crush it, and … it is the duty of the church to intervene.” It was a sermon filled with fighting words and while they would encourage Quebec workers, they’d cost their speaker his job.

That man was Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau of Montreal, and his sermon, delivered from the pulpit of Notre Dame Church on May 1, 1949, enraged Premier Maurice Duplessis. Such was Duplessis’s influence with the church that within a year Charbonneau would be gone.

Second Draft: Archbishop Charbonneau's sympathy for the downtrodden was more than Duplessis could bearBack to video

He had been Montreal’s archbishop since 1940. He was plain-spoken, impatient with protocol, sympathetic to the downtrodden, and utterly naive about the politics of the church and of secular society alike. It was a combination that would guarantee his downfall.

In February 1949, some 5,000 workers at four Eastern Townships asbestos mines went on strike for higher wages and improved working conditions. The strike was illegal, reflecting Duplessis’s horror of anything smacking of socialism. Violence soon ensued, especially after strikebreakers were brought in to get the mines running again.

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With no income, the strikers and their families were soon in a bad way. To relieve their distress, Charbonneau directed priests throughout his archdiocese to organize fundraising drives after each mass until the end of the strike. Donations, and the more generous the better, were a “charitable, Christian duty,” he said in his May 1 sermon. Eventually, as much as $500,000 was said to have been raised in Montreal and by similar appeals elsewhere in the province.

The asbestos strike would end in June, with the workers winning a modest pay increase but not much else. Even so, it is often seen as a harbinger of the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution.

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The 56-year-old archbishop had been getting under Duplessis’s skin for some time. Under Charbonneau’s aegis, the archdiocese acquired control of Le Devoir in 1947, after which the newspaper became more and more the premier’s foe. Charbonneau favoured admitting non-Catholics to Catholic labour unions, perhaps as a way of gingering up those generally tame bodies. Similarly, as ex-officio chancellor of Université de Montréal, he gave lay faculty members greater heft in the university’s affairs. In January 1949, to Duplessis’s displeasure, he backed a strike by Montreal’s Catholic teachers.

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But Charbonneau’s May 1 sermon was the last straw, not least because it complicated the efforts of Archbishop Maurice Roy of Quebec City to mediate the asbestos dispute. Duplessis biographer Conrad Black describes a campaign the premier soon launched “in utmost secrecy” to destroy Charbonneau.

Documents were assembled and sent off to Rome. The “social problem,” as Charbonneau’s obstreperousness was called, was brought to the attention of sympathetic cardinals and other ranking figures in the Curia — and ultimately, it was hoped, to the attention of Pope Pius XII himself. Charbonneau, who had warned of a conspiracy against Quebec workers, had no inkling that one was being directed at him.

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The blow fell in January 1950 when the Vatican ordered Charbonneau to resign. He appealed, asking leave to explain himself to the pope in person. Apparently he even booked a flight to Rome. He was ignored.

Late that month, Charbonneau was put on a plane at Dorval Airport. He had two suitcases and just $70 in his pocket. He was bound for Victoria, B.C., and the Mount Saint Mary’s Home for the Aged. On Feb. 11 his resignation was made public; it was for reasons of health, the Vatican said, which did nothing to stop the churning of the rumour mill. The Gazette archly speculated about “disagreement with certain civil authorities.”

Charbonneau would never see Montreal again. In his forced retirement, he was occasionally heard to say, “Duplessis says ‘the bishops eat from my hand,’ and unfortunately they do.” After his death in 1959, his body was returned to Montreal where it lay in state in Mary Queen of the World Cathedral. His funeral was attended by 30 bishops and hundreds of other dignitaries. They did not include Maurice Duplessis, who had died three months before.

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